Economic Justice

About: Economic Justice is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 41600 publications have been published within this topic receiving 661535 citations.

Ideological production: The making of community mediation

Abstract: Through an analysis of the structure of the community mediation movement in the United States and an ethnography of the practices of mediators in local programs, this paper examines how community mediation is made, and how it is ideologically constituted. The ideology of community mediation is produced through an interplay among three ideological projects or visions of community mediation and organizational models, and by the selection and differential use of mediators to handle cases. We argue that ideologies are formed through the mobilization of symbolic resources by groups promoting different projects. Central to the production of mediation ideology is a struggle over the symbolic resources of community justice and consensual justice. Although various groups propose differing conceptions of community justice, they share a similar commitment to consensual justice, and this similarity is produced through reinterpretations of the same symbols. The ambiguities in community mediation are, it appears, being overtaken by consensus on the nature of the mediation process itself.

Reason and Feeling in Thinking about Justice

Abstract: Recent feminist scholarship has challenged the corpus of Western political thought in two new ways. Some works focus first on either the absence or the assumed subordination of women in a political theory, and then go on to ask how the theory would have to change in order to include women on an equal basis with men. Some focus more immediately on how the gendered structure of the societies in which theorists have lived has shaped their central ideas and arguments and consider how these ideas and arguments are affected by the adoption of a feminist perspective. 1 In this paper, I hope to contribute something to the second project. I raise, though do not by any means fully answer, some questions about the effects that assumptions about the gendered structure of society have had on thinking about social justice. In so doing, I suggest that some recent distinctions that have been made between an ethic of justice and an ethic of care may be at least overdrawn, if not false. They may obfuscate rather than aid our attempts to achieve a moral and political theory that we can find acceptable in a world in which gender is becoming an increasingly indefensible mode of social organization.2

John Rawls: A Theory of Justice

Abstract: It may be helpful to those who are not familiar with Rawls to plot his position against a better-known moral theory, namely utilitarianism. At any rate, on this side of the Atlantic, where no modern charter contains the compact under which we consent to be governed, the defence of truth and justice has most often in the last hundred years appeared to be in the hands of the utilitarians. This raises two immediate questions: first, is justice a "special department" of morality? And second, do we by this mean to commit ourselves further to the position that the province of justice is not (whatever be the case for the rest of morality) governed by the principles of utility? After looking at these questions, we can go on to assess the particular solution proposed by Rawls. It is perfectly possible to be, broadly, an utilitarian and yet to give the principles of justice a special status. For instance, in The Concept of Law, Professor Hart carefully distinguishes "fairness" (which roughly covers justice) from morality in general.1 And Hart, I suppose, is a modern utilitarian. Why should the two ever have been confused? The explanation can be found by looking at Mill's chapter on the connection between justice and utility.2 Mill rightly saw the idea of justice as an obstacle to the simple test of utility in assessing right and wrong. People, that is, went on referring to this rather old fashioned notion, and seemed remarkably attached to it, despite being urged to look to expediency instead. But to Mill, this notion of justice had to be either irrational or the reflection of the operation of a perhaps concealed principle of utility.